The present invention relates to a tonneau cover device of a vehicle which comprises a rear opening portion formed at a rear portion of a vehicle body, a back door to open and close the rear opening portion, a rear baggage compartment formed in front of the rear opening portion, and a tonneau board provided so as to extend substantially horizontally over the rear baggage compartment.
Conventionally, an automotive vehicle equipped with a back door (tail gate) disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 39-16961 is known. Herein, a rear baggage compartment is partitioned into two baggage spaces, an upper space and a lower space, by a front-side panel fixed to a seatback of a rear seat and a rear-side panel arranged in back of the front-side panel, and an automatic support device equipped with a pair of arms operating to pull up a rear end portion of the rear-side panel when the back door is opened is provided so that a rear upper face of the above-described lower space can be opened so as to provide an easy baggage's bringing in or out of the lower space of the baggage compartment.
In case the rear-side panel with a specified width which covers an upper rear portion of the rear baggage compartment is pulled up in accordance with the opening operation of the back door as disclosed in the above-described publication, it may be necessary to design so that the rear end portion of the rear-side panel does not contact a side face or an upper end portion of the rear baggage compartment. Accordingly, there were problems in that the size of the rear-side panel or its movable range were restricted, the kind of vehicles to which the above-described structure is applicable were limited, and so on.
That is, the normal vehicles generally have a vehicle-body shape in which an upper portion of the vehicle body becomes narrower in a back view and a rear portion of the vehicle body becomes narrower in a plan view. Therefore, if the width of the rear panel is set at a specified value which corresponds to the width of the rear baggage compartment, there is a problem in that in case the rear end portion of the rear-side panel is pulled up in accordance with the opening operation of the back door, the rear end portion would easily interfere with the upper portion of the side face of the rear baggage compartment with the narrow width. Thus, there were problems in that in order to prevent this, the size of the rear-side panel or its movable range would be restricted, or the kind of vehicles to which the above-described structure is applicable would be limited to a particular vehicle, such as a so-called station wagon type of vehicle having a box shape of the rear vehicle body.